There are a number of soap dispensers commercially available some of which are wall mounted and include a base adapted to be mounted against a wall or other vertical surface and a cover. The covers are generally hinged to the mounting base and so as to be capable of swinging to an open position to permit loading into the dispenser and to a closed and locked position for operation. In that regard, the soap is often sold in replaceable containers such as collapsible bags with a dispensing tube extending therefrom and having a dispensing nozzle on the projecting end.
Examples of such dispensers can be seen in Potter U.S. Pat. No. 4,715,517, Lippman U.S. Pat. No. 4,765,515 and Kanfer U.S. Pat. No. 4,621,749. This prior art discloses dispensers in which a push bar is secured either to the cover or to the base member so that upon engagement and actuation of the push bar by the hand of the user the dispensing tube containing the soap is collapsed so as to eject a predetermined portion through the dispensing nozzle at the end of the tube onto the hand of the user.
Another dispenser in this field can be seen in Kanfer U.S. Pat. No. 4,582,227 which discloses a pump type soap dispenser.
All of these dispensers are commonly located and used in many different environments. Particularly, however, they are often used in a hospital or restaurant setting wherein sanitation is of prime importance.
Various regulatory bodies have determined through experience that on average these sanitary requirements can be met if a predetermined number of hand washings per employee occur during a predetermined period of time such as an hour, a shift, etc. Thus, for example, if two parties are involved and the desired number of hand washings on average is ten per hour, the total number of hand washes involving the particular dispenser in an hour would be twenty.
The difficulty involved in measuring compliance with these various regulations and aspirational goals is that the user will often "pump" the dispenser. In other words, the user will often engage the push bar with his or her hand and depress it partially or fully and then maintain hand contact and repeat the depression movement several times. Therefore, if one is to simply measure the number of times that the pressure bar or push bar moves, one would record a number of hand washings in such an instance that would be, in fact, inaccurate.
Therefore, it has become apparent that it is desirable to be able to measure not the strokes of the push bar or other activating member but the number of individual hand washings or dispensing events which actually take place.